


That Translucent Alabaster of Our Memories

by waketosleep



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, Gen, security blankets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-19
Updated: 2009-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-22 14:56:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waketosleep/pseuds/waketosleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Security blanket (n): someone or something that gives a person a sense of protection or a feeling of security.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Translucent Alabaster of Our Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Posted to my journal in 2009.

When Spock was a child, he had a security blanket.

It was the grey of pavement, unthinkable for a child of Earth but soothing to Vulcan tastes, one metre squared (except for nearly a centimetre of one side which had unravelled during washing, from a broken thread), and soft as air from years of use. It was a typical swaddling blanket which he was often wrapped in as a baby; Vulcans would, when these items outlived their usefulness, either pass them on or dispose of them as necessary. Amanda had kept this blanket, and Spock's early childhood was bracketed by its presence.

Amanda's delighted laughter would ring through their house as he stumbled around, a bright-eyed toddler, dragging it by a corner. Naps were marked by its softness on his cheek as he curled around its scrunched form, on his bed or more often on the sun-warmed rug of the living room. It had an important role in his playtime, to carry things, to function as an imaginary item of dress, or simply as something to sit on. The blanket wore stains as mementos of its adventures, though Amanda washed out the worst of them with tender attention.

Sarek did not approve of his son's constant companion.

“It is improper to form an attachment to inanimate objects,” he said.

Amanda ruffled Spock's hair as he blinked up at his father, in awe of his presence.

“Ah yes, that _would_ be a Vulcan no-no.” Her voice was long-suffering and teasing at once.

“He is going to school in ten months, Amanda.”

“At which point, he won't be my baby anymore.”

And because their household had a long history of compromise, the issue of Spock's blanket was not raised again. The night before he started school, six years old, Amanda gently folded up his blanket, careful of the frayed corner. Its worn fabric draped easily over her arm and folded up small, and when it was a neat bundle she turned to tuck it carefully into a carved trunk. Spock watched her shut the lid on it and they stared at each other for several minutes, in contemplative silence. The first of many.

“Spock,” she said finally, gathering him into her arms. He laid his head on her shoulder and breathed in deeply, the smell of her an enduring memory.

His socialization at school had the predicted effect, and Spock's blanket languished in the dry darkness of the trunk for years, its existence barely marked in his brain as he studied to enter the Vulcan Science Academy.

When Vulcan was lost, after Spock had had sufficient time to accept the loss of Amanda (it didn't make him want to scream and lash out at things anymore, not every single time he thought about it), he broke his evening meditation with a choked-off sob, because that trunk was lost along with everything else he'd loved about Vulcan.

*** 

When Jim was a child, he had no use for security blankets or favourite stuffed animals.

Well-meaning relatives would try to make him explain himself and he would shrug and go back to playing in the dirt. Heroes didn't need baby things like that, and Jim had adventures to go on. Sometimes you had to plan ahead for these kinds of things, especially when you lived in Iowa where there was nothing but dirt and grass all the way to the horizon (even if you stood on top of the barn).

Jim was no baby and everyone knew it, especially his mom's boyfriends. They'd laugh or ruffle his hair (one day, he was going to bite the hand that did that) but it was clear in their eyes that they knew.

That probably made it smart of him to keep his one, prized possession a secret.

He'd found it on the carpet of his mom's bedroom when he was four, sitting where it had fallen from the top of her dresser, and he'd known right away what it was. Some impulse had made him keep it, hidden in his fist until he scurried back to his own room. Later he was glad, because one day not long after, she'd picked up every trace of his father in the entire house and thrown it all in a box. Jim had searched the house, the attic, the basement and the barn and had never found that box again.

His secret, though, he managed to keep hidden from her rampage, under a loose floorboard in his room. Jim knew it was a uniform decoration, some kind of commendation. Not the Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry they'd given his mother when she'd gotten back to Earth, the flashy one that had sat in its dust-gathering display case till it was swept up in the exodus of his father's life; this was a small, gold pin with the familiar Starfleet insignia pressed into it. It fit easily in the palm of Jim's small hand and was worn smooth and shiny from years of being pinned to a dress uniform. Jim wore it smoother over the years, digging it out of its dirty hiding place to rub his thumb over it as if it were prayer beads, staring thoughtfully at its shine and the ever-fainter symbol on its surface.

Randomly, he would feel the urge to look at it, to feel the metal warm in his fingers, and he would sit cross-legged on his bedroom floor, his back against the bed, and rub the pad of his thumb over it slowly, watching it catch the dusty sunlight with a glint. If he was in the mood for it, he might try to imagine what it had been for. At first, it was always the reward for some epic battle victory, the record of lives saved, but then he knew it was far too small for that, too small to compare to the neglected medals in their display case.

After a while, he decided that it was from the Academy. Something simple: a simulation well done, top marks on exams, a debate team award (he hoped inside, though, that his father hadn't been nerdy enough for the _debate team_ ). Maybe even as an ensign, his first successful mission, some commendation from his grateful captain.

It didn't really matter what Jim guessed, because no one would tell him if he was right or not. Eventually the pin would go back under the loose board and he'd brush off the dust before going out to play or eat his dinner or go to school.

The pin came out of its hiding place less and less, the older he got. It was already a rare thing by the time he'd stolen the car (he'd spent a couple of hours with it after his mother had come to bail him out of the county lock-up, the youngest person there by a decade and cuffed to a desk rather than be put in the holding cell with a drunk and a guy who'd held up a liquor store). He hit his teens and discovered the joy of women instead of contemplation, and the pin caked up with grime and neglect, its smooth finish marred by dirt that picked out the Starfleet insignia in sharp relief.

That sleepless night before he joined up himself, he sat for hours in his room carefully prodding at his nose and staring at the floorboard, but he never pried it up to dig out the pin, and so it lay forgotten in the dust and cobwebs.

*** 

When Jim was forty and walking up the creaking stairs of his mother's house again, his stiff dress uniform clinked with the sound of his own medals shifting against each other. His uncomfortable dress shoes squeaked and thumped loudly on the worn floorboards as he pushed open the door to his room. It was long since a guest room, all the touches of his childhood taken away to leave a bed with flower-printed sheets and a dresser half-stuffed with good guest towels.

The floor was clean—she'd been pretty fastidious about the chores even after she got sick—and there were no dustbunnies as he settled on the floor, by the bed. His memory led him to the right spot and he dug his fingernails into the wood, hoping the board hadn't been fixed. With torque in the right spot, it came up easily and he couldn't help smiling as he reached underneath (the space was tight for an adult hand) and felt around.

His fingers came out black but with the pin gripped precariously between them; he dropped it into his palm and rubbed away the grime. Some dirt still sat in the grooves when he held it up to the early sunlight. Jim pushed down the floorboard with one hand and settled back against the bed, carefully so that it wouldn't shift and scrape against the floor.

He didn't know how long he sat there, the bedframe pressing against his spine, the floor hard underneath him, the pin cool to the touch until his fingers could warm it. He remembered countless hours of his childhood, sitting in this same position, but he thought of nothing in particular, so when a telltale creak of the floor in the hallway startled him, he was surprised to find that his eyes were damp. He got to his feet quickly but stayed beside the bed, facing the window, as Spock appeared in the doorway.

“Jim,” he said, in that low, intimate tone that only Jim ever got to hear.

Jim blinked once more before turning around, his hands behind his back in some semblance of parade rest. He didn't trust himself to speak so he just raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Spock's eyes swept the room quickly but without comment. “The service begins in thirty-six minutes,” he said instead, making eye contact. “Leonard and Nyota are waiting in the kitchen.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “Yeah... I'm coming.”

He stuffed his hands casually into his pockets, letting the pin drop safely from his palm into the left one before wiping his dirty fingers against the linings. He managed to affect a casual saunter over to the door. “My old room,” he said with a jerk of his head, when he reached Spock.

Spock just nodded and, as they headed for the stairs, wordlessly pressed a hand to his shoulder.

 

THE END


End file.
